Free Toolkit: Apartment Leasing Tips and Tricks for Video Tours
Inside the toolkit:
- Learn how to record an apartment video tour that converts.
- Watch our step-by-step unit recording best practices video.
- Download our 9-point cheatsheet for future reference.
About the Toolkit
Next time you go to purchase an item or lease a car, think about the entire experience. Experiencing firsthand the number of options throughout a purchasing decision will help you see the value in providing an array of touring options for your community! Not sure how to get started with virtual tours? This toolkit is for you!
This downloadable resource will explain exactly how you can use pre-recorded video tours to promote your property. It includes a step-by-step guide to get you started on using video to advertise your properties, as well as some of the market research supporting this approach.
What Is A Leasing Consultant?
While the role may vary from one multifamily community to the next, the core principle and task that is tried and true across all leasing professionals is leasing! That being said, you will rarely, if ever, be wearing just one hat. As a leasing agent or leasing consultant, you are a public face of the property.
Your day-to-day tasks could include any of the following:
- Market the Property
- Setting up and running ads, hosting events, a/b testing different marketing campaigns, and more. It’s all about casting a wide net.
- Generate “Traffic”
- Whether it’s online website visits, inbound emails or phone calls, or in-person visits to the leasing office, this traffic is necessary for the success of your community and a result of the marketing you and your team have done.
- Convert Traffic to Leads
- While traffic is great, if you can’t convert that traffic into actual interest and prospective residents that are interested in learning more, then everything will fall flat.
- Greet & Host Visitors
- Whether it’s walk-in traffic, scheduled tours, or residents popping in with questions, you are likely the first desk that people will come to when they get to the leasing office.
- Convert Leads to Leases
- Conversion really is the name of the game. You converted traffic to leads and now it’s time to convert those leads into signed leases.
- Follow Up
- Not all leads will convert for various reasons, but don’t write them off. Keep track of all leads and the document the reasons they didn’t lease the first time around. Proactively follow up down the road to see if their needs have changed and if you can convert them the second time around.
- Property Management
- While it will vary property to property how much you are involved with property management, providing residential services to residents, fielding repair requests, and meeting other tenant needs will likely be a part of the job.
Leasing Agent Goals
While each individual leasing professional should have goals that are personalized to their skill sets, weaknesses, and property needs, there are some standard goals that can help guide you on the path to greatness as a leasing agent.
The one core leasing agent goal is and should always be to close leases and serve residents. One of the qualities of a good leasing agent is the ability to turn abstract goals into action items. If you need guidance and direction, you and your manager might think about creating a leasing consultant daily checklist for you to stay on task as well.
Smart goals for a leasing consultant might include:
- Prospect Traffic
- How many calls, emails, walk-ins, or tours are you able to schedule? Keep track of the source of each visitor.
- Apartments Leased
- Set weekly or monthly goals for how many new leases you close.
- Closing Ratio
- This is one of the most important leasing agent statistics — what percentage of leads and tours end up signing a lease?
- Average Sales Cycle
- Simply looking at your closing ratio alone doesn’t tell the full story. Tracking how long it takes you to close deals from inbound lead to signed lease is number that can make all the difference for hitting / exceeding your goals.
- Sight-unseen Leases Closed
- Sight-unseen can be tricky, but with the right tools in place, are incredible deals for a leasing consultant. If you struggle closing sight-unseen, a video leasing platform like Realync can make a big difference.
- Service Requests Fulfilled
- If you’re helping with property management, what’s your average response time for service requests or resident inquiries? Move quickly to ensure happy residents!
Leasing Agent Training Checklist
Every new job is an opportunity to learn. Your manager might provide you with a leasing consultant training manual, run you through a program for leasing agent improvements, and recommend leasing consultant books or free leasing agent training modules available online.
However, your training and learning shouldn’t stop there. Just like your goals should always be changing and progressing, so should you as a leasing agent. Just because you crushed your goals last month, doesn’t mean that next month will be any easier. Think about training as continued growth and continued education to be better, lease more efficiently, and always be the best version of you that you can be for the job.
To create your own leasing agent training checklist, you should include:
- Property Features and Amenities
- If a prospect asks you about the pool policy or the rules for shuffleboard, do you know the answers? Choose one amenity per month to learn everything about and become an expert on your community.
- Company Policies
- This will likely be covered day one on the job, but continuing to refresh yourself on company policies and learning them inside and out will show your commitment to your company long-term.
- Real Estate Laws & Fair Housing
- Always changing and always important. Keeping up with the latest Fair Housing and real estate related laws and legislation will ensure that you are knowledgeable and can protect yourself and your community.
- Sales and Closing Techniques
- While it’s great to shop other multifamily communities to see what they’re doing or not doing, think outside multifamily as well. Look at sales professionals in other industries and learn from their best practices as well.
- Resident Service Procedures
- Want to progress from leasing agent to property manager? Immerse yourself in all things property management. Learn from your maintenance team, ask questions, and know / understand all procedures in place for your team.
- Leasing & Property Management Software
- Talk about always evolving! Take time to step back from the systems you use day to day and learn what else is out there. What’s new in the industry? What are your pain points that could be resolved with a new technology or platform?
Apartment Marketing Plan Template
Task number one on our list of leasing agent responsibilities was marketing for your community. And, this is a big task with a lot of different ways to approach it.
We’re focusing on creative ways that we’ve seen successful leasing agents market their property successfully to generate leads that convert. The property management company that you work for probably has an apartment marketing plan template or program already in place, but a lot of the execution or customization may be on you and your team. You may also take that template and organize it into an apartment leasing action plan that you can execute—it’s all about the goals and checklists.
While a brand-new property must be marketed aggressively to build a lead list and get prospective residents in the door, your marketing plan for a stabilized asset will look very different. So pick and choose and adjust accordingly, but here are some ideas for what your property management marketing plan template could include:
- Internet Listing Services
- Expensive, but necessary. Ensuring that your community is listed on the popular real estate listing sites like Apartments.com, ApartmentList, Zillow, and even Craigslist will ensure you are where people are searching.
- Advertising
- Your mind may first go to radio, print, billboards, or even local TV, but think beyond those channels. Knowing your target audience, you can get great results with social media marketing, sponsored posts, and even retargeting of your website visitors.
- Networking
- Building relationships with major employers in the area is a strategy that can pay dividends for your community. Their relocating new hires will need somewhere to live!
- Flyering
- Distributing fliers to nearby restaurants and retailers is a great way to not only get in front of their clients and patrons, but your community may be of interest to their employees as well.
- Local Experts
- Outreach to local REALTORs and apartment locating offices who refer tenants may not be a top strategy for all leasing agents, but can certainly be a successful one in highly competitive markets or when your inbound leads slow.
- Lease Incentives
- Offering incentives (aka concessions) to prospective residents isn’t new and isn’t fun, but is sometimes necessary based on your market and comps.A free months’ rent, waived deposits, gift cards, etc. are all tried and true.
- Get Bold
- Concessions like the above ones can be great, but get really creative. If you need some quick conversions or traffic, think about offering a “look-and-lease” discount to prospects who lease on the first visit or a $500 Amazon gift card to the first lease to sign on Saturday.
How To Close A Lease Deal
To ensure that you are equipped to handle all of the various leasing scenarios that may arise and close deals with even the hardest prospective resident, here are some top tips on how to take a prospect to a signed lease:
- Pre-qualify the Prospect
- Your marketing efforts should do a good job of producing qualified leads for you but take the step upfront to confirm that the property is a fit in terms of the price range, income requirements, pet policies, and background check items like credit, rental, and criminal history. This could save you and your prospect lots of time and energy if any of the above criteria aren’t met.
- Bring a Checkbook
- You are much more likely to close a lease right then and there if the prospect can easily write a check for the deposit! This is something that not many leasing agents may think to ask for, but it’s bold and can work to capitalize on the time you are spending with prospects.
- Take the Tours to Them
- There are likely to be prospective residents that can’t get to the property because they’re moving from out-of-market or simply have busy schedules. Instead of letting two weeks pass while you wait for them to come visit the property, take the tour to them by either sending personalized videos or hosting a live video tour with them powered by Realync!
- Presume the Close
- Refer to the available unit(s) as “your home” and say things like “when you live here, you will find…” or “after you’ve moved in, we offer…” This is subtle, but helps the prospective resident envision the space as their home.
- Use “Success Stories”
- Using third-party anecdotes from other renters adds validity to what you’re saying and helps it feel like what you’re saying is a confirmed experience and not just something that you’re telling them. Say things like, “our residents love how…” or “one of my residents discovered that…”
- Unearth Objections
- You know there will be pain points or objections or key questions along the way. Kind of like the pre-qualifying, proactively head off and answer as many questions or objections as you can early in the process.
- Create Urgency
- Does the prospect love a particular floor plan or desire a particular view? Point out that their favorite floor plan could lease-up or that the current promotion will no longer be offered at the end of the month. While timelines for moving can rarely be changed too much, their signing the lease doesn’t mean they move in tomorrow. Get them to commit now even though they aren’t moving in for 2 months. One less thing for them to worry about.
- Ask for the Sale
- This may seem basic, but if you don’t ask, the answer is always no! Shoot it straight and just ask—“Would you like to leave a deposit?,” “Are you ready to reserve your apartment today?,” or “Would you like to make ABC Apartments your new home?”
- Follow Up
- Even if the answer to the above questions is “no” or “not at this time”, that doesn’t mean you write them off and stop trying. Make sure to follow up with personalized messages, video, and other updates to stay top of mind, provide value, and receive updates. Are they moving from out of town? Send them a list of local internet providers that they can research for service. Or do they have kids? Send them a list of fun Summer activities planned in the park nearby.
Leasing Agent Follow Up Script
The number one key to efficiently following up with prospective residents is personalization. Anyone can set an email drip campaign to automatically follow up with prospective residents. To truly stand out, you can take a core leasing agent follow up script, but personalize it at every step for each individual lead.
To lay the foundation for your follow up scripts, templates, and techniques for leasing apartments, consider including the following:
- Greet Warmly
- Excitement is key. Your first interaction sets the mood for the entire conversation and is likely someone’s very first impression of your community as a whole. So follow accordingly as well with energy and enthusiasm. “I’m so happy you are considering ABC Apartments as your next home!”
- Address Concerns
- Through your first interactions with a prospective resident, you should have learned what they care most about, what they’re looking for, what they like and don’t like, etc. Return to that list of desires and needs in your follow up. It will not only showcase that you were paying attention to their needs but is also a chance to remind the prospect that your property meets all their “must-haves”.
- Ask About Concerns
- Didn’t hear any concerns or hesitations when touring with the prospect, but didn’t get the signature? Ask what reservations they have about closing the deal. Getting those out in the open and teasing out objections will lay it all out there for you to overcome them. If there aren’t any, then there should be nothing else to do but sign the lease.
- Don’t Hard Sell
- There will be prospective residents that really don’t like or can’t handle the hard sell. You’ll know them when you ask for a signature and they shy away or shut down. Continue to provide information about the benefits of your community in your follow-up. Showcase resident events, discuss discounts established with local retailers, etc.
- Tour Again
- While it is not fun to have repeat showings and is a potential black hole of time invested with one prospective resident, inviting the prospect for another tour of the building may be just the thing that gets them back ‘in the game’ with you and could push them to lease signature.
- Use Video
- Google research shows that people retain 95% of a message when viewed via video compared to just 10% when reading text. Have a message that you want your prospect to actually retain and, hopefully, react to? Send a video! This could be anything from a personalized video reminding them all that you toured together or an amenity video or unit tour that they can share with roommates or family.
- Ask for the Sale!
- Like we said above — it never hurts to ask! Proactively sending prospects the lease application to at least review or inviting them to fill out an online application and reserve their apartment today is the ideal next step with any prospect.
Leasing Agent Organization Tips
There is clearly no shortage or work that goes into leasing a multifamily community. Leasing up a new brand new community is a big task with lots of moving parts, but continuing to lease and manage a stabilized community comes with its own set of challenges and stresses.
While this may seem very old school, one of the best leasing agent organization tips that we have come across is to prepare a leasing binder. This is a three-ring compendium of information about the community. Each section of the binder should be separated by labeled dividers to access the info easily and quickly.
What goes into it this leasing binder? Here are some of the top ideas we’ve seen in leasing binders:
- Floor Plans
- Not just for websites. Having the layouts and pictures of each individual floor plan is key. Don’t stop there though. Make sure that you have all of the key measurements and notes on features and variance for those units as well. It may be best to leave availability and pricing to the technology platforms for real-time information though.
- Site Map
- Not just for the vendors that visit and might get lost on your property. Having a site map helps identify where a particular apartment unit is in reference to amenities, parking, views, and more. This a great resource to walk through with onsite visitors.
- City and Neighborhood Maps
- Going beyond the walls of your property are a key part of any leasing process. People want to know what is in the area, the best routes to work, how far the nearest grocery store, and more. Include reference notes like public transit routes, school information, and nearby parks, restaurants, and more.
- A Current Leasing Report
- While having an updated system that easy to access and that tells you which apartments are available, when, and for what price, having this information on paper can save lots of time ‘behind the screen’ when prospects are physically there with you and looking for quick access to information.
- A Rental Application
- While most communities are going digital with applications, having one available in your leasing binder can be beneficial, in case the prospective residents needs to grab one and go, or would prefer putting pen to paper versus filling it out online.
- A Three-ring Pouch
- Simply typing that takes us back to middle school, but it’s unbelievable how helpful having a pouch in your binder can be. Storing helpful things like pens, a calculator, and a tape measure means instant access to things that can frequently be very handy during tours and prospect meetings.
Ready to Get Real?
Accelerate Leasing
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Speed Up Lease Up
by providing construction updates and showcase your space without having to do hard hat tours.
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PRE-LEASE OCCUPIED UNITS
by ‘showing’ them without having to physically tour the space by sending pre-recorded videos.
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CONVERT A HIGHER PERCENTAGE OF YOUR LEADS INTO LEASES
when you receive notifications when prospects are viewing videos to cater your follow up.
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SPEND LESS TIME TO CLOSE EACH LEASE
by removing roadblocks and barriers in the leasing process.
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INCREASE SIGHT-UNSEEN LEASING
by making it a breeze for out-of-market leads to choose your community.
Improve Community Engagement
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PROMOTE YOUR PROGRAMS BETTER
via pre-recorded videos by linking via social media or internal apps.
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DECREASE MAINTENANCE REQUESTS
by creating maintenance videos.
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REINFORCE COMMUNITY RULES
by receiving notifications when residents are viewing videos to know who has seen a message and who hasn’t.
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REDUCE REPETITIVE QUESTIONS
because consumers retain 10% of a message when reading it via text, but 90% of a message when viewed in a video.
More Than Software
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Virtual Training
is available for every property utilizing Realync.
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Make your video efforts consistent
with one set, standardized process and platform.
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TRACK ENGAGEMENT And Usage
across your entire portfolio.
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Partner with the Realync Team
to create a personalized training program to be rolled out across all properties.
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Are you Ready to Get Real?
Talk with us today to see how Realync’s platform can 4X your lead-to-lease conversion!
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